Application: Setting Goals for Your Professional Development

Becoming an early childhood professional is a complex process. There are many areas of knowledge and skill to develop. There are understandings, attitudes, and dispositions that are vital in helping you support the diverse needs of young children and families. No wonder professional development is a lifelong process. There is much to know-including recognizing the need to be open to and aware of changes in society and changes in the field that impact young children and families.

This Application will help you to focus on specific areas, or competencies, that are part of the professional development of all early childhood professionals and to target those areas of special interest or concern to you.

To complete this Application, do the following:

Read and Reflect

Carefully read "Seventeen Competencies for Becoming a Professional," in the Morrison course text. As you read the description of each competency, stop to consider your own level of knowledge and familiarity with this area. As a student of child development and a lifelong learner, keep in mind that you will always be in the process of learning more and becoming more capable in each area of competency.
Set Goals

With the seventeen competencies and your personal reflection in mind, respond to the following three points:

Summarize how you can use these competencies as a checklist of goals to support your professional growth.

Choose three of the seventeen competencies you consider, at present, to be the most important professional goals for you to focus on in order to increase your professional growth. Explain your plan for how to raise your level of knowledge and skill in each of these three competencies.

Choose three competencies other than those you identified above that relate most closely to your current thoughts about the career direction you would like to follow in the early childhood field. Explain how each competency may help prepare you for the particular career area or for a specific position. Then set a goal related to each of these three competencies and briefly describe your plan for achieving each goal.